Seeking justice for Del Monte farm deaths

As families of the dead men question the company's version of events, friends say the food firm bribed them

- Edwin Okoth  Emily Dugan and Grace Murray

When Roda Wayua Kimeu woke on Christmas morning, her first thought was her eldest son, Bernard Mutua. For three days she had been searching for him in a river that runs along Del Monte's pineapple fields at its vast farm near Thika in Kenya.

Bernard, 22, was with a group of about 20 men who were confronted by Del Monte security guards when they went to steal pineapples from the farm on 21 December. Four of them never came home.

His friends said Bernard had last been seen being beaten and pushed into a river by guards employed by the farm, which is the largest exporter of Kenyan produce to the world.

By mid-morning on Christmas Day, three bodies had already been pulled from the Chania River in the preceding 24 hours: they were Francis Miumi, Mbae Murumbi and another man known as Mkisii. All of them had been with Bernard on the farm that day.

Knowing her son could not swim, Roda, 38, feared the worst. "We were just crying by this time," she told the Guardian. It was after she moved about 100 metres away from the crowd that she saw the body floating in the water. "I knew him because he has brown skin ... His body was swollen and had visible red marks on his back," she said. "I cannot describe what I felt. It is the pain of birth, the pain of a mother."